buying books

There used to be an obscure bookstore behind Oxford Street, not too far from the Photographers' Gallery, that sold books in almost as many languages as there are versions of Wikipedia. Grant & Cutler was the name of the place. It was a bookstore of the old school, with high rows of shelves standing so close together that there wasn't room for one person to browse and another to pass by. There weren't any comfy chairs and there wasn't an espresso bar. There was no room for such decadence. The shop, only slightly less cavernous than the subterranean infinity of Sam Weller's on Salt Lake City's Main Street, was filled to the brim with books. The selection was split halfway between learning (textbooks, dictionaries and exercise books) and application (literature) of several dozen languages.

I went to Grant & Cutler today to see if they had a guidebook on Galicia in any language I am familiar with, (Nothing has been written on the northwestern corner of Spain in English in recent years), but I was to be disappointed. The bookshop had closed, a sign of the times perhaps. Unable to compete with the infinite shelves of amazon.com, most bookshops are struggling for survival these days. Some have given up already, even chains. Those that still operate tend to be sad places, oozing an atmosphere of impending doom with their few customers and infrequently ringing tills, with customers walking out with a thin volume or a greeting card or a diode reading light to give as a gift.

Going into bookshops depresses me. The palpable feeling of desperation mixes with my guilt at not shopping more at bookshops and amplifies it. I love reading and I love books, but I don't buy many new books and thus contribute to the eventual extinction of bookstores. It makes me sad to imagine a world without bookstores. It would be a poorer world no doubt, but I see it as inevitable. The truth is that between used-book shops and amazon.com, I don't need anything else for my literary needs.

In Grant & Cutler's window hung a sign that informed the potential customer and any idling passer-by that the store had found a new home inside the warm bosom of Foyles, the grandmother of London bookstores. Over its 100 years, Foyles worked hard at developing a reputation as the biggest independent bookseller in Britain and the most exasperating. There was not much commercial drive and disentanglable chaos on the shelves. Marcel Proust's 3,000-page A la Recherche du Temps Perdu was apparently filed under Short Stories. It was a very British oddity, but also a disaster.

About ten years ago, things started to change. Foyles became like other stores: brightly lit, modern, with electronic indexing and books in the right categories and sorted by author. Customers could grab a book off a shelf and pay for it on a till. It might sound obvious, but for Foyles this was a revolution.

After strolling through Soho, mostly on east-west running streets and always on the sunny side, I made it to Cambridge Circus and from there up Charing Cross Road. Foyles was open for business and looked inviting. The foreign-language section was enormous. Later, I would find a guidebook to Northern Spain in the travel section, but for now I was glued to Borges in a bit of a turn of events.

The other day, going out for the last long run before the marathon, I wasn't quite sure of what to put onto my Sansa. On a hunch, I went to the iTunes Store, searched for the New Yorker and subscribed to their fiction podcast. Among the episodes I downloaded and then listened to on an easy run along the Thames was Borges's The Gospel According to Mark, which I picked primarily because I love Paul Theroux, who was reading the story.

I had no idea what I was in for. The story is absolutely brilliant. So much is said in these few paragraphs that it's hard to imagine cutting even a single word and retaining the full meaning. The story is so tightly composed and yet feels so effortless. Here was something I absolutely would have to read, and read again.

So it came to pass that I found myself kneeling in front of one of many shelves filled with Spanish-language books recently acquired from Grant & Cutler (the books, not the shelves), going through Borges story collections one by one. The selection was wide and each table of contents long, but I wasn't successful. I might have missed it, but maybe it wasn't there. In any case, I left the store without a Borges. At least I bought the guidebook, but when I later found El Evangelio según Marcos online, I pounded another nail into the coffin of conventional book selling.